An advertisement presented to a member of a target audience draws various levels of engagement by each audience member. For example, audience members may not even be aware of an advertisement considered to have a “low engagement level.” In such cases, the audience members only mindlessly or passively observes the advertisement, such that the audience member may not even be able to recollect the advertisement though it was viewed by that audience member. Conversely, for advertisements considered to have a “high engagement level,” the advertisement captures the direct and undivided attention of an audience member. Subsequently, that audience member may actively pursue a course of action suggested by that advertisement or purchase a product or service that is the subject of that advertisement.
Recent advances in marketing communications technology have created a new sense of awareness within the advertising industry of the value of highly-engaging advertisement impressions. For example, the increased availability of the Internet and early web content in the 1990s provided a new advertising medium in the form of web page banner advertisements. These “banners” were valued for their low cost per impression. However, such untargeted impression-based advertising suffered from low engagement levels, and rarely garnered audience member's attention, which was measured in terms of a click-through rate.
More recently, Google's keyword targeted “Adwords” and other similar targeted forms of advertisements, such as behavioral targeting, improved advertising techniques by targeting the viewing or activity context of the viewer. The aforementioned targeted advertisements are able to realize much higher levels of engagement, e.g., higher click-through rates, than untargeted banner advertisements had previously provided.
Despite the existing amount of television usage and the importance to advertisers of engaging an audience, there exists a lack of a cost-effective technology to measure the engagement of, e.g., television audiences during advertisements. Television advertisements are primarily measured by their ratings. These ratings are determined by the number of viewers associated with a program during which the advertisements are shown. This measurement technique is a relatively old technology, analogous to the impressions of online banner ads. For example, Nielsen Media Research has provided ratings of television programs for decades using audience logs, both electronic and hand-written diaries.
Other costly measurement techniques have also been employed. For example, some marketers have performed engagement level studies of relatively small audiences through, e.g., conducting surveys or performing manual observation of focus groups. However, such aforementioned techniques are too laborious, time consuming and expensive to apply to a large sample including large audience and/or for multiple advertisements. In addition to being expensive, the small sample size is often prone to statistical invalidity. Thus, the use of engagement level studies is limited.
Furthermore, the increased marketplace adoption of television technologies such as digital video recording (“DVR”), picture-in-picture viewing (“PIP”), Internet web browsers and applications (including “apps” for over the top (“OTT”) television technology), have provided the viewer with increased opportunities to have minimal engagement levels with television advertisements, if not to skip over advertisements entirely. Accordingly, television as an advertising medium faces increased challenges with respect to both attracting and maintaining audience engagement.
For at least these reasons, there exists a need for a technology to measure the engagement level of television audiences with high accuracy, statistical validity, and cost effectiveness, in order to provide feedback to advertisers about the effectiveness of television advertisements beyond a simple ratings metric.